Saying neigh to horses in the Highlands

It's been said that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

Not in the New Jersey Highlands.

There, it's illegal to lead a horse to water in the first place. You've got to fence off streams and ponds so the horses can't get to them.

That's just one of many regulations that are forcing horse farms out of the Highlands, says Vikki Karcher Siegel. I first heard of the 79-year-old Siegel's plight a few weeks ago when I was doing a column on the Highlands master plan. I'd heard rumors that the state had told the owner of a horse farm that her horses couldn't walk in her horse ring.

That sounded crazy. After all, the politicians who pushed the Highlands Act assured us that the point was to preserve farms. And you can't preserve a horse farm by cracking down on the horses. That would just drive the farmer into bankruptcy.

That's the state's goal, Siegel told me when I visited her farm the other day.

"They're going to try to take my farm for nothing," Siegel said.

They're probably going to succeed. On the day I visited the Snowbird Horse Show on Schooley's Mountain, riders were putting their horses through their paces over a variety of jumps in the horse rings. The impression created was of horse-country affluence.

But the fees don't amount to much when compared with the expense of administering such a big swath of land. That wasn't a problem back when Siegel's husband was healthy and made extra income as a builder, she told me. When he got too old to work, the Siegels figured they'd make up the lost income by permitting a cell phone tower to be built on a far corner of the farm.

The state issued approvals. But after the Highlands Act was passed in 2004, the state demanded that Siegel eliminate one of her riding rings to make up for the "impervious surface" lost to the cell tower. I put that term in quotes because of the way the state defines it -- a point crucial to understanding the nature of the Highlands land grab.

As we headed out to the tower, Siegel rode alongside me on the motorized cart that she uses to get around. She can't walk because of circulatory problems. As for her husband, he's now in a nursing home, suffering from dementia.

The farm was supposed to be their nest egg, but it got scrambled by the state. The 68 acres had been zoned for two-acre residential construction, which would have given it a value of perhaps $6 million. Now it's worth a fraction of that. Nothing new can be built on it.

"My husband always said that if worse came to worst, he would lay out the lots and we could sell the farm," said Siegel.

Worse has come to worst. The nursing home called the other day and demanded that she pay the bill for keeping him.

"I don't have the money," she said. "They said I have 30 days until they'll send him home."

The fight over the cell tower is illustrative of how the Highlands Act is being used to force people off the land. Theoretically, the law protects groundwater supplies by limiting surfaces that keep rain from entering the aquifer. But the act defines gravel as an impervious surface. Therefore most farms with gravel roads are already using up their quota for impervious surfaces. In reality, gravel is an ideal surface for recharging aquifers. At the Shore, homeowners are being urged to replace lawns with gravel for that exact reason. When we got to the cell tower, I noted that the base was almost entirely gravel, so no groundwater is being lost. As for the riding rings, their surface is soft mulch over pea gravel, again ideal for recharging the groundwater.

It's not the water that the state wants, said Siegel; it's the land. She finds a parallel in the history of Hungary, where her mother grew up and experienced the Communist takeover.

"At that time, they owned their farm. They had chickens and geese and stuff, and that's how they ate," Siegel said. "When the Communists came, they took all the critters and they took away the property rights, and you had to go into town and get your quota of food."

Her mother escaped Hungary. Siegel's stuck in Jersey, however, pinning her hopes on a suit filed on her behalf by the free-market Pacific Legal Foundation. But the legal process takes years.

"What they're hoping is that senior citizens like myself are going to die before this goes through the courts," said Siegel.

If that's what they're hoping, they'll probably get their wish. Siegel says her husband will soon have to go on Medicaid after she exhausts her limited savings. As for her, she's likely to end up in town, awaiting her quota of food.